MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Tuesday, 21 October 2014

Wynn Wheldon's memories of Dannie Abse, the great Welsh poet who died recently

DANNIE ABSE

by Wynn Wheldon

I met Dannie Abse when I was very young. He and his wife Joan were always guests at my
parents’ Christmas Party. Dad and Dannie
had met at a reception given for an American war correspondent. Dannie was just about to leave when my
father, who was a stranger to Dannie, called over, “You Welsh Jew! Let me take
you out to lunch”. They went to a posh
restaurant, where Dad ordered an avocado for Dannie, as he had never had one
before. Dannie told me this story on three separate occasions, always with a
chuckle. And Joan, it turned out, had been at LSE at around the same time as my
mother. So there were Connections.

Invariably, they would bring a
book to the party, one of Joan’s anthologies or Dannie’s latest novel,
collection or memoir. He was spry and
amused and intelligent and small and handsome; his characteristic demeanour was
a kind of wry cheerfulness. He was, after all, a lifelong socialist.

He was also curious. He had the doctor’s curiosity (he was a chest
surgeon) and the poet’s curiosity, and these two curiosities complemented each
other in his poetry. The provable world
hosted the improvable. There was no
subject beyond the range of his poetry.

I kept in touch with Dannie,
sending him my own stuff from time to time.
He was always generous both with praise and criticism. I saw him read occasionally. He came to dinner and we talked about
restaurants in the Finchley Road.

The last time I saw him read was
at the T.S. Eliot awards do at the Festival Hall (his book, Speak, Old Parrot, was shortlisted and
should perhaps have won. He was thrilled
to be on the list). The reception was
generous and warm. It was impossible not
to be fond of Dannie. One of the poems
he read was ‘Cats’, which I’m prepared to predict will become a popular
favourite. It isn’t his greatest poem,
but it does what poetry does so well – turns the mundane into the universal,
while at the same time being a portrait of the artist himself: who is – who was
- a modest, funny, generous man, and a poet to remember. Look it up.